New software business helps clients make sense of electronic communications to deliver better customer experiences

Kodak Alaris today announced the creation of AI Foundry, a business dedicated to helping organizations process and learn from structured and unstructured data through the use of proprietary Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology. The launch of AI Foundry marks the next phase in Kodak Alaris’ evolution as a leading provider of information management solutions, building on the success of its award-winning document scanners and capture software, which power business processes in many of the world’s largest companies.

According to IDC, unstructured communications and related content – email, pictures, instant messages, documents, and other formats – account for 90% of all digital information. This unstructured content must be read and understood, before a response can be created and a business process initiated. As a result, organizations require new automation solutions to address the volume and variety of unstructured data or face increasingly labor intensive B2B or B2C processes.

“Unstructured communications are a disruptive force to the enterprise, breaking automation, adding cost to business processes, and driving down customer satisfaction,” said Steve Butler, general manager of AI Foundry. “AI Foundry was established to harness the power of artificial intelligence to understand amorphous data and provide smarter ‘context aware’ information management. With our end-to-end solutions for automating business processes, enterprises can work with AI Foundry to solve customer experience or content management problems holistically and drive the greatest ROI.”

Artificial Intelligence based solutions are especially powerful when used to understand customer communications and take action—whether responding to an inquiry, building a knowledge base, or kicking off a workflow process. By adopting this new wave in technology, organizations can deliver more accurate responses on the first interaction, reduce handling times, minimize transaction costs, and increase staff productivity. More important than just saving money, businesses can now drive up customer satisfaction and loyalty by creating better customer experiences.

AI Foundry’s flagship offering, Info Insight, is ideal for businesses across a variety of industries and vertical markets, such as insurance, healthcare, retail, logistics, utilities, and anywhere customers interact electronically with their vendors. The algorithms underpinning the solution rely on linguistics (i.e. semantic understanding) to make sense out of unstructured communications, while learning in real time and “getting smarter” over time. Info Insight also incorporates smart routing to send inquiries and suggested responses to the “best person” considering that person’s skill level, availability, time zone, and even language.

“The name ‘AI Foundry’ aligns with our iron-clad solutions for understanding and managing unstructured communications,” said Alan Swahn, vice president of marketing at AI Foundry. “The core advantage is that Info Insight uses natural language processing to read and understand unstructured information from all media that we use to communicate in our daily lives, including email, web chats, text messages, email attachments, and social media content. Traditional rule and keyword-based systems just aren’t up to the task of solving today’s problem. Our new breed of ‘context aware’ information management, positions AI Foundry to capitalize on the explosive growth of unstructured data.”

According to a report by Forrester Research2, AI is evolving fast in this decade, and it will become part of the daily engagement of customers with computers, devices, wearables, and systems we interact with to get tasks done, get answers, get support in making decisions, and automate repetitive actions.

The investment in AI Foundry demonstrates Kodak Alaris’ commitment to further embed itself into organizational business processes, as companies seek ways to manage all forms of communication to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.

1EMC Digital Universe Study, with data and analysis by IDC, April 2014

AI Foundry, a Kodak Alaris business, enables a new generation of self-learning software that significantly increases the automation within enterprises by understanding, learning, and taking action on electronic communications from all information channels, including email, web chat, social media, smart phone texts and paper scans.

Organizations can deliver accurate responses on the first interaction, reduce handling times, minimize transaction costs, and increase staff productivity—all resulting in a better customer experience. Our artificial intelligence driven software can be utilized by customers on their premises or deployed from the Cloud in a Software as a Service (SaaS) model. Our focus is enabling our clients to have greater customer loyalty and satisfaction, while reducing operational costs.

Kodak Alaris is a company born from one of the world’s most iconic brands. The Information Management division enables organizations to capture content from paper and digital sources, extract insights, and deliver the right information to the right place at the right time for better business outcomes. Our portfolio includes award-winning document scanners and capture software that automate business processes for many of the world’s largest companies.

Our Imaging division includes Retail Systems Solutions, the world leader in photo kiosks and dry lab systems; Paper and Output Systems that provides the broadest photographic paper and workflow solutions to specialty retailers, professional labs, and photographers; Film Capture that offers consumers and professionals a complete range of still-camera film products; and Event Imaging Solutions that delivers digital souvenir photography services at theme parks, iconic destinations and resorts worldwide.

The Kodak trademark and trade dress are used under license from Eastman Kodak Company.